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SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.
It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.
Native ports for all major operating systems are available:
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)
All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:
• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit
In the Arithmetic test, the aggregate performance of the APU fell short of the Intel i3-2105 but was almost identical when overclocked. This shows that you don't necessarily have to sacrifice integrated graphics power for CPU processing power. In the aggregate multimedia test, we also saw similar performance from the APU when overclocked and from the Intel i3-2105 even though there were some variations in each specific test. In all of the cryptography tests, the A8-3850 beat the i3-2105 easily thanks to excellent AES256 and SHA256 performance. Floating point performance in the multimedia test is also particularly strong.
Seems brilliant for a high end media center. wouldnt even need a discrete card in most cases.
Interesting idea to watercool it…….. wonder how far the hardcore overclockers will get it.
A low end video card would work wonders in that system the way it can be combined. would have liked to see a few more discrete cards in the line up for curiousity.
I think that Asus board will sell very well, depending on the price. seems pretty loaded if they can get it out around the £100 pp.
ATI are really saving AMd lately. GPU power FTW.
quad core really does help. are there plans for a 6 core version at some stage? with their power saving techniques, it could be really efficient at idle then have some serious power when needed.
Power consumption is great. I think you might actually be able to get away without a discrete card with this, for a while anyway. If you wanted to game at 1080p and maybe only drop some settings.
Direct X 11 titles might prove too much, but its a hell of an improvement. hopefully we start seeing these in laptops. and battery life should still be good.
People also underestimate the importance of the GPU, which is growing significantly more key as the operating systems develop. the GPU will at some stage handle a huge portion of windows rendering tasks. AMD are miles ahead of intel in this regard, thanks to buying ATI. Intel need to buy nvidia. what do they do instead? buy mcafee.
madness.
I’ve already added this one to my ever growing wishlist. Lovely review, btw.
Need the whole system price to really be sure, but looking good so far
@Lee: Couldn’t agree more, low price on one component is not enough.
I recently built my sister a Llano based system, it was the A6-3650 version though, Gigabyte motherboard, 4gb Ram a 500gb HD, DVD writer, 19inch flat panel monitor a case with 450w PSU and keyboard/ mouse…£320 including delivery from Aria.
Installed Black Ops on it, and it played OK, at 1366 * 768 resolution with no AA. Would maybe need to knock off one or two other settings to get it playing perfectly. Windows scored the system a 4.5, but oddly that was down to Windows own 2d performance, everything else was around 5.9 (HD) up to 6.4 (3d gfx) (processor got a 6.1
All in all for the price I was impressed with it. For a do a bit of this and a bit of that computer, which wouldn’t really be used for 3D and video editing these systemsa re great. (without monitor / keyboard / mouse it was only about £230!)